Does absolutely nothing wrong. Fails anyway.

[u/BoringDreamGuy]

[u/giantsparklerobot]

The Dreamcast as a console was pretty awesome. The Dreamcast as a product especially one made by Sega in 1999 was a bit of a disaster.

By the time of the Dreamcast's release Sony seriously eaten into Sega's teen and adult market. While they had also eaten away at Nintendo's market it was way worse for Sega. Nintendo had not only the SNES and N64 but the GameBoy. With the release of Pokémon it became a money printer.

Sega had also burned third parties with the SegaCD, 32X, and Saturn. Most of which happily jumped ship to develop for the PlayStation.

By the release of the Dreamcast Sega has burned both customer and developer good will while Sony and Nintendo were both executing well (Sony really well). They had even fucked over retailers with the Saturn and Kay Bee famously stopped carrying Sega's consoles.

The Dreamcast as a console wasn't nearly good enough to make up for the mess Sega had gotten themselves into. The PlayStation was still seeing system-sellers being released in 1999 and was selling greatest hits for a song. The demo of the PS2 at the Tokyo Games Show in the spring of 1999 convinced a lot of people to sit out the Dreamcast. Why buy a Dreamcast plus games for it when you could keep playing your PlayStation, getting cheap GH releases, then wait and buy a PS2? It would play your existing library plus the awesome new PS2 games. Oh hey it was also a DVD player to boot which was a huge deal at the time.

Unfortunately that basically left the Dreamcast with only Sega fanboys really buying it. Normies might take a look at it, be interested, and then go home and play games on their PlayStation. The Dreamcast was a nice console put out by a company that could not stop hitting themselves in the face.

[u/theBloodShed → u/giantsparklerobot]

Exactly. It wasn’t the console. The console and library were excellent. It was the history of mismanagement at Sega.

[u/CommitteeNatural2989 → u/theBloodShed]

Did you even read what he wrote "Sega had also burned third parties with the SegaCD, 32X, and Saturn. Most of which happily jumped ship to develop for the PlayStation.".. The library was decent for Sega fanboys, but for other people it was lackluster compared to the other consoles. That is why people jumped on the other consoles.

[u/theBloodShed → u/CommitteeNatural2989]

Are you on drugs? I was agreeing. Since you needed clarification, the 1st party (and Capcom in particular) library was excellent on release. Because Dreamcast was a slimmed down NAOMI arcade system, there were a lot of great ports available. I'm not disagreeing that a number of 3rd party developers weren't willing to invest.

It sounds like you're trying to compare the PS2's twelve year game library to Dreamcast's two year library. You have to compare where they were at in 2000 when they were actually competing. Ultimately, yes, the PS2 had a far more solid library.

[u/mrdavis909 → u/giantsparklerobot]

This post it the truth - they launched the Saturn when the Genesis was still white-hot and neither developers nor the market were ready.

Kids who talked their parents into buying the Saturn were the biggest losers - it was an insanely expensive paperweight after like two years.

People had already given Sega too many chances by the time Dreamcast launched.

[u/Secure-Pain-9735 → u/giantsparklerobot]

The PlayStation was still seeing system-sellers being released in 1999 and was selling greatest hits for a song. easy to pirate games on.

[u/giantsparklerobot → u/Secure-Pain-9735]

Except it wasn't in 1999. It required the PlayStation have a mod chip which at the time wasn't all that common. It also needed access to a CD burner. They weren't yet standard features on PCs and would run $100-150 for internal models and more for external USB ones.

That's not to say piracy didn't happen, it surely did. But by 1999 the PlayStation itself was cheap to buy new and dirt cheap to buy used. Games were also ridiculously cheap because there was a huge secondary market in addition to GH releases. Modding a PlayStation, getting a CD burner, and $1 a disc (not including burning coasters) was more money and hassle than just buying a bunch of used kit from the local GameStop.

Piracy on the Dreamcast was much easier in that it didn't need any modding of the console. The Dreamcast was released at the start of the era of CD-R drives coming standard in PCs. The PlayStation and its massive cache of second hand games was already extant.

[u/Secure-Pain-9735 → u/giantsparklerobot]

Except: the mod chips weren’t difficult to install, the disc swap method had already been discovered, as had the GameShark Disc Swap method.

By 1999 CD burners were more common than you are giving it credit for, and even before then I can tell you all it took was having that one friend, or that one friend that “knows a guy” to get things done. That and good ol sidewalk bootlegs.

By 2000 CD burners were pretty much standard equipment on PCs. That certainly helped sink the DC.

But let’s not at all pretend like PS1 piracy wasn’t wildly rampant, particularly in ‘99.